French justice rejects claims to compensate nuclear tests’ victims

French court rejected a lawsuit that was filed by five victims of the French nuclear tests in the south of Algeria and French Polynesia, in response to the rejection of the French Defense Ministry to the requests that were filed by the concerned to claim compensation for being affected by exposure to nuclear radiation during their military service.

Widows of the five French soldiers, who were victims of nuclear tests, because they worked in places where nuclear tests, have raised judicial claims asking for compensation, but a specialized administrative court, announced last weekend, that it rejects these calls, while it deferred to consider two more files to the middle of April, as these files were deposited by the victims on July 2011, on the backdrop of rejecting their demands of compensation.

Judicial decision led to the intervention of the Association of Victims of ancient nuclear tests, to demand the abolition of the law that was prepared by Herve Morin, Defense Minister in the former government of Francois Fillon, as reported by French media, as the defense lawyer of the victims decided to appeal against the rejection decision, and the lawyer Licel Labbruni, expressed confidence in accepting the appeal, and criticized the  law, describing it as non homogenized.

Controversy still exists about the duration of the French nuclear tests in Algeria and, if everyone agrees that the beginning was on 13 February 1960, by bombing its first nuclear test in Reggan, southwestern Algeria, and there is talk of these experiments continued to the end of the seventies and not in 1966, as is commonly known.